I've been wanting to write an OSX app and get into Xcode recently, so I decided to make a nice Cocoa-based 7-Zip for Mac.

It was hard to understand the black magic behind InterfaceBuilder, but Apple has a bunch of nice examples built in to their help system which helped a lot.

Objective-C is weird at first.  You dont usually need to implement an interface (like c#), but if you name your methods the correct name, they just magically get called by the runtime.  Makes discovering how to do things a google/stackoverflow exercise, rather than inside your IDE.

This is v0.1.  There is no support yet for creating archives, zip files are set to open with 7-Zip Mac by default and there are no preferences.  But its useful already I think.

http://www.1amstudios.com/projects/7zipMac/

OpenC1 1.4

So I meant to post this a couple of weeks back, but things have been pretty crazy busy with moving to San Francisco from New Zealand.

OpenC1 1.4 is available now from http://www.1amstudios.com/projects/openc1

Changes

• Downloads and uses free C1 demo, SplatPack demo and SplatPack Xmas demo content
• Fixed (for real this time) ATi rendering issues
• Lots of small bugs 
• Added pedestrian gibs 
• Added support for some strange SplatPack .pix files
• Fixed gameplay issues like being awarded credits and time for the AI running over peds

Edit: OpenC1 1.4 source code now available on http://code.google.com/p/openc1.  Go check it out!

Carmageddon is back!

Now its official news I can tell you guys - Stainless Software has got the rights back to the whole Carmageddon series!!  

There is a new Carmageddon game in the works, and for me, no more Square Enix legal threats!  There is also a possibility of the original game being re-released for modern Windows system which personally I am pretty excited about :)

So check out the new carmageddon.com and get involved on the community forums!

I'm not sure exactly what this means for OpenC1 - as you can tell development has stopped for a while and I'm working on other projects, but I've been talking to Stainless on and off for a while and they are pretty supportive which is great!

Thanks for all the feedback :)

1.3.1 is available - http://code.google.com/p/openc1/downloads

Changes:

• New setting "Disable culling" which should fix cars being partially invisible if you have an ATi card
• More logging (to log.txt) which includes files opened and crash information.  
• OpenC1.pdb included in zip file.  This means more detailed crash information will be generated to help diagnose problems.

Please submit problems to the Issues list at http://code.google.com/p/openc1/issues.  It will help to keep all problems visible :)

If you can replicate a crash in 1.3, please use 1.3.1 and submit your log.txt after the crash.

cheers!

OpenC1 v1.3 is now available for download!

• Download OpenC1 1.3 here
• Download OpenC1 Non-copyrighted data folder here

Read the instructions in the readme.txt file first.  Basically you have to extract the data folder to somewhere, then set the 'Data folder path' in OpenC1Settings.txt to point to it.  

You must read and agree to the license.txt in the OpenC1 download before using OpenC1.  Please note - as the license states, if you are affiliated with Square Enix you are prohibited from using OpenC1 or the OpenC1 source code.

Speaking of source code, OpenC1 is now actually open!  Full source is hosted on google code at http://code.google.com/p/openc1. If you are a programmer and interested in helping out, please jump in.

I'll be probably be taking a break from OpenC1 development to concentrate on other projects.  I feel like I've learnt almost all I will learn from this project, and plus its summer here in NZ which isn't good coding weather!

Merry Christmas :)

I've been quiet for a while here.

Luckily have been able to find great lawyers who are experts in IT and copyright.  They actually understand what OpenC1 is technically (they are the first lawyers I've dealt with in this whole case who have...) and how NZ copyright law applies to this case :)

As it currently stands, I have agreed to not infringe Square Enix's copyright in the future, but I will be releasing new OpenC1 versions shortly.

Check out the blog next week for an OpenC1 progress update :)